Что почитать январскими вечерами

пятница, января 07, 2011 12:37

Есть такой знаменитый в узком кругу ограниченных людей сайт arXiv.org, архив публикаций, где ученый люд имеет возможность быстро опубликовать свои вполне профессиональные статьи и материалы. Причины могут быть разные - срочно ознакомить коллег с горячими результатами и инициировать дискуссию, застолбить приоритет до неторопливой журнальной публикации, опубликовать обзор или неформатное эссе, которое написано, но непонятно где публиковать. Причин много. Но покопаться в этих записках иногда очень интересно.

Found in France: 2200 Year Old Manuscript by Greek Mathematician Archimedes Сегодня мы подобрали несколько статей, которые могу заинтересовать многих читателей, поскольку затрагивают общенаучные вопросы. Да, язык публикаций - английский.

Are we teaching students to think like scientists? by J. Christopher Moore, Louis J. Rubbo

University courses in conceptual physics and astronomy typically serve as the terminal science experience for non-science majors. Significant work has gone into developing research-verified pedagogical methods for the algebra- and calculus-based physics courses typically populated by natural and physical science majors; however, there is significantly less volume in the literature concerning the non-science population. This is quickly changing, and large, repeatable gains on concept tests are being reported. However, we may be losing sight of what is arguably the most important goal of such a course: development of scientific reasoning. Are we teaching this population of students to think like scientists?

A New Scientific Revolution at the Horizon? by Gilles Cohen-Tannoudji, Sylvain Hudlet

At this beginning of the 21st century, the situation of physics is not without analogy with that which prevailed a hundred years ago, with the outset of the double scientific revolution of relativity and quanta. On the one hand, recent progress of observational cosmology makes think that one has discovered a new universal constant, perhaps as fundamental as the velocity of light or the Planck's constant, the cosmological constant, which could explain the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. On the other hand, just like the efforts of Planck and Einstein to reconcile thermodynamics and the electromagnetic theory of light led to the operational beginning of quantum physics, the unexpected discovery of bonds between thermodynamics and general relativity makes to foresee new concepts, perhaps heralding a new scientific revolution, like that of holography and leads to consider a "thermodynamic route towards quantum cosmology." We will discuss the possible implications of these observational and theoretical developments.

Научно-фантастические романы могут скоро стать реальностью - свежие новости из лабораторий о космических путешествиях через пространственно-временные червоточины, полеты со сверхсветовыми скоростями и прочие чудеса

Progress in revolutionary propulsion physics. by Marc G. Millis

Prior to 1988, traversable wormholes were just science fiction. Prior to 1994, warp drives were just fiction. Since then, these notions matured into published scientific discourse, where key issues and unknowns continue to be raised and investigated. In 2009, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics published a peer-reviewed, expansive technical volume on these and other investigations toward breakthrough propulsion. This paper summarizes the key assertions from that 739-page volume, describing the collective state-of-the-art and candidate research steps that will lead to discovering if, or how, such breakthroughs might finally be achieved. Coverage includes: prerequisites for space drive physics, manipulating gravity or inertia for propulsion, lessons from superconductor experiments, null results with "lifters", implications of photon momentum in media, quantum vacuum physics, and the faster-than-light implications of general relativity and quantum non-locality.

По следам литературных героев

Волшебный плащ Гарри Поттера может стать реальностью:

Harry Potter's Cloak. by X. F. Zhu, B. Liang, J. Tu, D. Zhang, J. C. Cheng

The magic "Harry Potter's cloak" has been the dream of human beings for really long time. Recently, transformation optics inspired from the advent of metamaterials offers great versatility for manipulating wave propagation at will to create amazing illusion effects. In the present work, we proposed a novel transformation recipe, in which the cloaking shell somehow behaves like a "cloaking lens", to provide almost all desired features one can expect for a real magic cloak. The most exciting feature of the current recipe is that an object with arbitrary characteristics (e.g., size, shape or material properties) can be invisibilized perfectly with positive-index materials, which significantly benefits the practical realization of a broad-band cloaking device fabricated with existing materials. Moreover, the one concealed in the hidden region is able to undistortedly communicate with the surrounding world, while the lens-like cloaking shell will protect the cloaked source/sensor from being traced back by outside detectors by creating a virtual image.

И в заключение - сразу две статьи о современных научных приключениях героев Страны чудес Льюиса Кэрролла (правда несколько более профессиональные):

The story of ALICE: Building the dedicated heavy ion detector at LHC. by C. Fabjan (CERN and IHEP Vienna), J. Schukraft (CERN)

This article documents the main design choices and the close to 20 years of preparation, detector R&D, construction and installation of ALICE, the dedicated heavy ion experiment at the CERN LHC accelerator.

Dynamic Red Queen explains patterns in fatal insurgent attacks. by Neil Johnson, Spencer Carran, Joel Botner, Kyle Fontaine, Nathan Laxague, Philip Nuetzel, Jessica Turnley, Brian Tivnan

The Red Queen's notion "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place" has been applied within evolutionary biology, politics and economics. We find that a generalized version in which an adaptive Red Queen (e.g. insurgency) sporadically edges ahead of a Blue King (e.g. military), explains the progress curves for fatal insurgent attacks against the coalition military within individual provinces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Remarkably regular mathematical relations emerge which suggest a prediction formula for the timing of the n'th future fatal day, and provide a common framework for understanding how insurgents fight in different regions. Our findings are consistent with a Darwinian selection hypothesis which favors a weak species which can adapt rapidly, and establish an unexpected conceptual connection to the physics of quasi-random walks.

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2 comments:

Unknown комментирует...

ура! блог ожил! так держать, спасибо, интересный блог!

SavinASavA комментирует...

"...В узком кругу ограниченных людей.." )))

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